


but lover, you're the one to blame

by plinys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Five Times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 05:04:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12403749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: It would be impossible not to read into the fact that of all the cities and time periods in the world, Rip would chose her city to set up the base of operations for the Time Bureau.





	but lover, you're the one to blame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheSushiMonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSushiMonster/gifts).



> Not beta'd because I was too impatient to post/too lazy to find one. But I'm back in DCTV hell where I belong so expect more of this ship (and other Legends/Flash ones) heading your way soon. 
> 
> (Technically Shruti prompted part of this, but I like,,,, got off base with her prompt, but I'm still gifting it to her???)

1

The first time is an accident.

Well, no.

Not an accident.

Because there was no part of this that was unplanned, not part of this that was coincidence and circumstance. Not when Rip Hunter was in Star City. It would be impossible not to read into the fact that of all the cities and time periods in the world, Rip would chose  _ her  _ city to set up the base of operations for the Time Bureau. He was basically begging for her to interfere.

Tracking him down was easy, an office building with marked guards and the picture of a serious government organization that Sara knew better than to believe for a second. Not impossible for her to break into, not with her league training, but an unnecessary challenge when presented with another place Rip would return to each night.

That she just happened to find. Almost by accident.

Almost.

A quaint apartment building, in a decent neighborhood, a brick building updated sometime in the sixties with an air conditioner that only sometimes worked and not enough furniture to even pretend to be lived in. 

Still, there’s a couch. 

One she settles onto dramatically, and waits, lingers with intent for the inevitable. For Rip, ever boring and punctual with his only life, to arrive with a box of takeout and that awful suit that doesn’t fit him properly, not like his trench coat used to.

There’s a second after the door opens where their eyes meet. 

Her, sprawled out across his couch, pretending to flick through old catalogues. 

Him, key ring looped around a finger, take out box carefully balanced in his other arm. 

It’s not shock.

Not really.

Just like this isn’t an accident 

She breaks the silence, “Has anyone ever told you that your haircut makes you look like a limp dick.”

“Sara-”

“Not even a good dick, like, even I wouldn’t blow you, and that’s-”

“Technically this is breaking and entering,” he tells cuts her off. There he is, the familiar Rip she knows, beneath the suit and the haircut that ages him, a little flustered and charmed. 

And she just shrugs, “What are you going to do arrest me?”

He has this look on his face, half serious, like he might. Like he could actually pretend to have some sort of government authority afforded to him in the past week (or past five years from his perspective.)

“No.”

“No,” she echoes back at him, her lips tipping up, an almost smile.

“If you’re going to stay, just know I’m not sharing,” he says, finally stepping into the threshhold of his own  home, shutting the door behind him, all while still carefully cradling his carton of take out to his chest. “This is mine.”

There’s things she should say, questions she should ask, the sort of things that have been sticking in her head since Rip and his Time Bureau showed up in LA to take the Waverider away from her. 

But none of them come to mind, because this feels like almost normal for them. If there ever was a normal. 

“Sure, I guess I can just starve to death.”

“You won’t-”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve died.”

“Sara-”

“Wouldn’t be the first time you kill-”

“Forks are in the drawer by the sink,” he says, with a resigned tone, and she doesn’t waste any time letting him charge his mind. Only stopping for a second when he calls out, “And Oh, Sara, get a job.”

  
  


2

“Why are you here?”

“Maybe I miss you,” she says, carefully twirling a pen between her fingers like a pocket knife, as she fills out a myriad of minimum wage job applications. It was surprisingly hard to find a job after having been declared dead twice and having never made it beyond a year of college. 

Who knew?

She ignores the job applications spread out over Rip’s coffee table and instead returns his question, “Why are you here?”

The question she should have asked from the beginning.

The question she’s not going to get an answer to. 

Not the one she wants. 

But she watches him, the way he closes his eyes for a moment, before echoing her own words back at her, “Maybe I missed you.”

  
  


3

“It’s too hot for clothes,” Sara says, because it’s nearly one hundred degrees outside and Rip has three fans hooked together in an attempt to cool down his apartment. 

It’s not successful.

Sara’s not entirely convinced that she’s not going to die of heat stroke. 

Somehow she had forgotten how unbearable Star City summers could be, especially when the person in question was too cheap to buy an apartment with a decent air conditioning unit. 

Her own apartment was much cooler. 

A thought which was almost enough to convince her to leave but Rip was here and looking miserable in a pair of shorts and a white tank top and it was almost worth suffering through the summer heat. 

Almost.

A little bit. 

“We should get ice cream,” she says, sprawled out on the floor rather than the couch because the floor is cool tile and the couch is hot leather and Sara knows exactly what she is about. 

“It’s too late for ice cream,”  Rip protests but it’s weak and half hearted and it doesn’t take him much longer to ask, “Wait, do you know somewhere to get ice cream this late?”

“It’s called two tubs of chunky monkey from the gas station, Rip Hunter,” Sara says, pushing herself up from the floor to look at him, “Two, because  _ someone  _ doesn’t share.” 

He looks chagrined at that. Which is sort of cute in a way, not that Rip is normally someone that would get classified as  _ cute  _ but - “I could be persuaded to share.” 

“Oh, I was talking about me, ice cream is a precious commodity in this economy,” Sara teases.

“Ah yes, I’d forgotten about the Great Ice Cream Crisis of 2017.” 

“Honestly, Rip, did they teach you anything at Time School?”

“Clearly not.

“Clearly,” she agrees. 

When he offers a hand to help her up, she accepts it, even though his hand is too warm in hers and she could have pushed herself up on her own. It’s nice for a moment. 

Just for a moment. 

“Speaking of which, what exactly is a  _ Chunky Monkey _ ?”

  
  


4

Rip’s late.

It’s not like they have a scheduled time or anything, that these meetings are planned, but she’s at his place for  _ dinner  _ often enough that Rip has started to bring an extra carton of take out home with him and it’s just -

Rip is predictable.

For all that he pretends not to be. 

And Sara is good at predicting him. 

Which means he should be here by now.

Unless…

There could be traffic.

Too many orders at the take out place.

Someone else breaking all of space and time. 

She’s not sure which is more likely, but in the end it doesn’t matter because Rip isn’t here, and she doesn’t want to be here. In this dismal apartment, staring at historical artifacts that used to be on the Waverider, and waiting. 

“Fine,” she says, to the empty apartment, tugging her leather jacket off the couch and back over her crumpled work uniform again. “Be that way-”

“Be what way?”

It takes a considerable amount of self control not to react to the second voice in the apartment, by throwing him against a wall with a knife at his throat, because the door is still closed and she knows Rip wasn’t there a moment ago. 

Something must show in her expression because he makes an almost guilty face before holding up his wrist, “Temporal displacement device, I was running late, and thought that you’d-”

“I’m not worried,” she says, but it’s too quickly.

They both know the truth. 

Despite training to help her hide her emotions, around Rip, it sometimes seems impossible. 

“I simply thought,” Rip says, slowly and carefully, “That you might have given up on waiting for me.”

“I had,” she says, because this is easy. This is true. The jacket over her shoulders confirms as much. 

“Can I convince you to give me a second chance? If you give me ten, I could grab us dinner and even come through the door like a normal person?”

There’s something about the way he says it. Like they mean something, more than just words, heavy with a weight of something. With meaning for whatever this is between them, and Sara isn’t sure she’s ready for that just yet. Whatever it is.

So, instead she just shrugs back off her jacket, and settles down on the couch before asking, “Rough day at work?”

He hesitates only briefly before taking the unspoken invitation to settle down beside her. 

“I actually ran into an old friend today.”

“Other than me?” 

His eyes say things that only she can read in them, a softness that seem to insist that she’s more than that, a softness that she avoids, purposely doesn’t bring attention to.

And instead lets Rip bury with the jokes that keep them in this perfect status quo, “I do have other friends.”

“You sure about that?”

  
  


5

She kisses Rip, because it was inevitable, because it’s been along time coming, and because he’s right there staring at her with wonder and amusement and regret all mixed up in those eyes and she doesn’t even know where to begin but kissing him is easy.

Kissing him is something she should have done ages ago, when they were together on the Waverider and a team.

When life was both more complicated and less complicated all at the same time. 

He kisses her back like this is what they’ve always been leading too.

Open mouthed, her name slipping out like the air that he breathes, hands heavy against her skin, pulling her shirt up over her head, pants down her hips. 

They fall together in Rip’s bed, the white walls of his apartment sheltering them, holding them in place as their bodies move together, slowly but with familiarity that has never been there. They know each other, maybe not all the secrets they each practice holding back, but they know the movements of each other’s bodies.

Easy and simple even if it is the first time between them. 

She knows him now, more than she ever had before.

She knows the feeling of his hands on her, in her.

She knows the way he sounds breathless and shaken as he says her name in the heat of the moment.

She knows the lingering feeling of being beside him, in a bed that is too hot, sheets kicked off onto the floor but bodies pressed together in the aftermath. 

She knows him.

  
  


+1

In the morning she takes the badge off his nightstand and doesn’t look back. 

It’s easier this way. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Find me (and prompt me) on tumblr @ plinys


End file.
